Exhibition Review — “Turn Every Page”: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive, New-York Historical Society Museum & Library
by Christopher M. Laico
Processing Archivist, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
Early in 2020, the New-York Historical Society acquired author and journalist Robert Caro’s substantial archive, which included the documents created and compiled during his research for his celebrated books, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York and the multi-volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Later that year, Debra Schmidt Bach, a curator at the New-York Historical Society tasked with reviewing the collection, visited Caro’s Upper West Side office and found herself so awed by its contents that she could only exclaim, “Wow!” The Society’s charge for Schmidt Bach and her colleagues was to capture the truly magnificent record of Caro’s life’s work — the “wow.” The fruit of their labor is “Turn Every Page,” the exhibition now permanently lining half of the New-York Historical Society’s second-floor hall. The exhibit, in five parts, covers Robert Caro’s life, from his youth as the editor of his school newspaper through his apprenticeship as a dedicated shoe-leather journalist to his prizewinning career as the preeminent biographer of American political power.
Always curious to learn the workings of the world, young Caro discovered that the process of explaining his findings to others not only clarified his understanding but also confirmed that the newsroom was a natural home for him to pursue his unwavering commitment to truth. The exhibition’s opening section traces Caro’s initial efforts in the pressroom. The first display, News Man, explores the earliest stirrings of Caro’s desire to become a writer as a student at P.S. 93 in Manhattan, where he created the school’s first newspaper on a mimeograph machine, and his subsequent transfer to Horace Mann School, where he became the editor-in-chief of the Horace Mann Record in his senior year. In college, Caro was a sportswriter for The Daily Princetonian, where he took more of an interest in the personae and the leadership styles of such coaches as Franklin C. “Cappy” Cappon than in the basketball team — an initial indicator of Caro’s fascination with authority figures.
At Princeton, Caro also learned a crucial early lesson from his creative writing professor, the noted literary critic R.P. Blackmur, who admonished him for not taking enough care in his writing. He promptly adjusted his technique by slowing down, writing his first drafts in longhand on legal pads, and typing the following drafts on his reliable Smith-Corona Electra 210. From this approach, a polished stylist emerged. With each revision, Caro strove for the narrative rhythm that struck just the right chord.
Several years out of the Ivy League, Caro landed a job at the journalistic juggernaut Newsday. Under the tutelage of his editor Alan Hathway, he soaked up several more maxims: to be relentless in his search for sources, to turn every page, and to track down every lead.
In his trade manual Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing (2019), Caro shares that from the very start he “thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times — particularly the force that is political power” (p. 3). Sections II and III of the exhibit, “Exploring Power,” detail Caro’s research treks through the dynamic bureaucratic landscape and childhoods of Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson to unearth the factors that shaped them and their ascent.
In this regard, the exhibit documents Caro’s initial struggles in researching his biography of Robert Moses. For example, after providing some preliminary interviews, Robert Moses soured on Caro and tried to shut off all avenues of information to him. Undeterred, Caro uncovered a governmental backchannel to Moses by way of a long-forgotten public records archive that had been housed in a storage room at the 79th Street Boat Basin. From these papers, Caro was able to piece together the cold-blooded maneuvers that Moses executed in his merciless redesign of New York City and his relentless quest for political control.
The exhibit shows the development of his craft, taking the lessons of deep research from his work on The Power Broker and extending his commitment even further while shaping his LBJ biographies. To fully convey the essence of Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, Caro moved to the Texas Hill Country for three years, investigated LBJ’s boyhood haunts, and spoke with those who had shaped the future president. The exhibit includes some historical items collected by Robert Caro and his wife, Ina, during this period. Exemplifying the toil of household labor in a home without electricity is a heavy flat iron from Ina’s private collection. Dubbed a “sad iron” by the women who worked laundry, these six-pound implements needed to be heated over a blazing stove and lifted by hand to press household garments (Working, p. xvi, xix). It was these deeply ingrained images of his neighbors toiling away with their sad irons that drove LBJ, as a “New Deal” congressman, to bring electric power to the Hill Country.
Part IV, The Craft of Writing, delves deeply into the extensive documentation that Caro amassed when doing his research on Moses and Johnson. On view is just a small selection from the thousands of interview transcripts, manuscripts, and notebooks acquired by the New-York Historical Society. All capture aspects of Caro’s meticulous journalistic craft: reading, researching, interviewing, organizing, and constructing comprehensive outlines. For this visitor, the most moving element of the display was Caro’s handwritten editorial reminders, directing himself to enrich the narrative. Some examples include, “Don’t put in any more on RK in the 1st section. Don’t ruin that wonderful rhythm,” and, poignantly, “The only thing that matters is what IS on this page.” These prompts echo the exhortations from his early mentors Blackmur and Hathway, who urged young Caro to take care in his writing and to turn every page.
The final section, A Writer’s Life, shares with museum-goers the rewards and accolades that Robert A. Caro has rightly received for his passionate pursuit of excellence — two Pulitzer Prizes, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Francis Parkman Prize conferred by the Society of American Historians, and the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. The New-York Historical Society has also achieved great distinction with this ongoing exhibit. Michael Ryan, the Sue Ann Weinberg Director Emeritus of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, along with Edward O’Reilly, curator of the manuscript department; Debra Schmidt Bach, curator of decorative arts; and James Hicks, exhibition designer, have truly done right by Mr. Caro, museum visitors, and archivists. They have captured for us the “wow” found in Caro’s archive and created a permanent exhibition that tells his unique journey from a young, neophyte newspaperman to an internationally acclaimed biographer. Please go see it. Experience the “wow.”
Bibliography
Barry, Dan. “What We Found in Robert Caro’s Yellowed Files.” The New York Times, 8 Jan. 2021; updated: Jan. 12, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/nyregion/robert-caro-archives.html.
Caro, R. A. (2019). Working: Researching, interviewing, writing. Alfred A. Knopf.
